When I was a child, I had this
recurring nightmare. After having watched the Wizard of Oz on TV, I began dreaming
at night of being
in the Land of Oz. The wicked Witch of the West flew into the city of Munchkins, and all
the Munchkins began to run in fear.
As I began to run, I screamed, but there was no sound coming out of my mouth. It felt
like no one could hear
me and that no one could help
me.

I knew
that it occurred while I was asleep. The fear
made me acutely aware, and I realized
that it was a dream
and not real.
I figured out that I could stop the dream
if I woke
up. I began focusing, during my sleep, on my eyelids and attempted to lift them up. This helped
me to become awake
right at the moment the wicked Witch of the West appeared. Over time this technique helped
me with this nightmare, and all my other nightmares. From that time on, every time I had a
nightmare, I learned to wakemyself
up by pulling my eyelids open. Thus began my first needed attempt at managing and
controlling my emotions.

Look at this scenario. What if a child was born emotionally
aware, and with a curiosity fuelled by positive and negative emotions,
and the intellectual ability to understand
those emotions.
Wouldn't this give rise to a child whose natural ability made him become emotionally
literate?

What if that child had grown
up into young adulthood feeling
something missing in himself
and language itself. What if that something missing was an understanding
of himself
and others. And what if that child had gone on to compose a new language, an emotionally
literate language, as an effort to fill in the missing information inside himself,
and where language fell short.

I feel
as if I
am such a person. I
am something like a savant who specializes in emotional
awareness and the use of language. In my late teens and early 20s, I composed Knowledge
of the Self
in seven volumes. I have since come to realize
that what I created was a language unto itself. Kind of like twins who create a language
only they can understand.
In this case, I created a language that only I could understand.

Since the time I wrote those books, I have been trying to figure out a way to make them
understandable
to others. I
am now 41 years old. I feel
very close to bridging that gap. I have now realized
that what I have composed is the Emotional
Literacy Language. It contains: emotional
language rules that coordinate learning, a structured emotional
vocabulary, word categories, an Outline of the Self,
word meanings and descriptions, Classical Literature annotated with emotional
vocabulary, emotional
word maps, rules that govern word association, emotional
objectives, emotionalgrowth
paths, and words that cue an infinite set of word combinations (phrases with meaning)
within the Emotional
Literacy Language.

Last spring I came upon the concept of Emotional
Literacy for the first time. I saw
immediately the link between Emotional
Literacy and self-knowledge.
The work I have been doing most of my adult life relates
to linguistics. My personal experience
was that while looking up words in the dictionary, I found words and meanings relating
to self-knowledge
insufficient to form
an adequate and useful picture. As I began to study words which related
to an Emotional
Language, I found words with shared meaning and also words with connected meaning. The
baseline for determining meaning and word connection was derived from personal experience;
and observation that was applied to studying various disciplines like psychology,
philosophy, religion and science.

My ultimategoal
is to go through the entire dictionary, and identify all useful words that relate
to Emotional
Literacy Education. When I paused working on identifying these words in 1999, I had found
4,913 Emotional
Literacy Vocabulary words. From that preliminary work, I believe that there are an
estimated 10,000 to 20,000 words in the Emotional
Literacy Vocabulary. In the dictionary I
am using, that would comprise 10% to 20% of all words.

I have also discovered that an expanded vocabulary could be broken down by grade level
and taught in schools. Utilizing an Emotional
Literacy Vocabulary, we have discovered that it can fit directly into the current
curriculum through lessons in reading, vocabulary, spelling and social studies activities,
etc. Though I personally believe testing is currently being
overdone in schools, the Emotional
Literacy Education System that we are proposing, would be measurable, and therefore more acceptable
to mainstream education. Our goal
is no less than creating an Emotional
Literacy Language and Education System.